'Shut up'

A smaller percentage of Americans are working today than did four years ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that payroll employment edged up by 114,000 in July as the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%. Aside from the pandemic, the last time the unemployment rate was 4.3% or higher was almost seven years ago, in Oct. 2017. But the unemployment rate alone understates rising non-employment in the United States. Over the past year, the population of people ages 16 and older increased by 1.8 million, but the number of those who are employed rose by only 57,000. That means only one out of every 32 was a net increase in employment. Whereas the unemployment rate tells us the percent of people who want jobs but do not have them, the employment-to-population ratio tells us what percent of people are working. Over the past year, the employment-to-population ratio of the people ages 16 and older fell from 60.4 to 60.0. That’s equivalent to 934,000 fewer people working today than just a year ago. And compared to 2020, just prior to the pandemic, there are 2.9 million fewer people working. Part of that decline is the result of baby boomers retiring—including some retiring earlier-than-planned due to a windfall increase in wealth caused by the steep rise in home prices since 2020. If another part of the decline were a shift from formal paid employment to more non-paid work caring for children and aging parents or volunteering, that would make the steep decline in employment less concerning. But the employment-to-population ratio of prime-age workers—ages 25 to 54—has actually increased slightly since the beginning of 2020, as has that of workers with children. The particularly troubling decline has been a 2.4 percentage point drop in the employment-to-population ratio of young Americans, ages 20 to 24, from 68.2 in Feb. 2020 to 65.4 today. This loss of 500,000 workers ages 20 to 24 is even more problematic when factoring in a 1.3 million decline in college enrollment since 2019. Idleness during the prime years of gaining education and experience can have lifelong consequences. Economic studies show that long periods of unemployment have lasting negative impacts on workers’ opportunities and earnings, their physical work capabilities and stress levels,  and even their fertility. Long periods of unemployment and idleness also increase the likelihood of spending a lifetime on Disability Insurance instead of working. Work is essential to a well-functioning society, and it is fundamental to human wellbeing. In contrast, the absence of work among capable individuals is a drain on the economy, a burden on the federal budget and other Americans’ incomes, and a loss of human potential. Policymakers can simultaneously relieve economic and fiscal constraints and add to human flourishing by creating an environment in which more Americans want to work and are able to find fulfilling work. That should start with: expanding apprenticeships and alternative education, replacing failed federal job training programs with more effective private and state and local programs, allowing states to adapt better welfare and workforce models like Utah’s “One Door” policy, eliminating unnecessary regulations that reduce jobs and wage gains, and protecting flexible work opportunities and successful small business models.    The good news for policymakers is that none of these actions requires more spending or new programs. Following the principle of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, “first, do no harm,” policymakers should address declining employment by remove government-imposed barriers to work.   The post Over Past Year, Working Age Population Increased by 1.8 Million; Only 1 in 32 Equal New Workers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On the latest episode of “The Tony Kinnett Cast,” we examine the colossal failure of Bidenomics and his proposed sequel to make things worse as another month of employment statistics warn of a looming recession in the middle of a presidential election year. Is an interest rate drop enough to save the stock market this fall? Pallet carpenter and creator Jake Cochrane joins us to discuss the latest trend in Do-it-Yourself crafts and why realistic projects are gaining more attention these days than the over-produced five-minute craft videos that used to be such a big deal. What’s the difference between your favorite tool and your biggest regret purchase from the hardware store? Gabriella Hoffman from the Independent Women’s Forum stops by to dig a little deeper into the connection between job numbers under Biden and what bureaucratic overreach from the federal government is doing to the energy and manufacturing sectors. You’ll be shocked to hear that cutting the energy supply from large tech and manufacturing organizations doesn’t spur growth in U.S. cities. The questions for this week’s “Mail Time” are sorted and slated, and we hit the best and worst of them on air and in front of God and everybody—for better or worse. Send us your submissions for “Awful Tweets” or “Mail Time” here! Catch the live radio show and livestream weeknights at 7 p.m. EDT on The Daily Signal’s YouTube, X, or Facebook. The post WATCH: Biden Celebrates His Upcoming Recession appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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It seems Joe Biden’s Department of “Justice” is becoming more of an oxymoron by the day.  Its latest double standard features a conservative Catholic organization begging them to investigate over four hundred known attacks waged by the abortion mafia on pregnancy centers and churches, LifeNews reports.  In a letter shared with the Daily Signal, the organization CatholicVote asked Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke to meet with them to probe the overwhelming cases of abortion radicals violating the FACE Act, which prohibits instigators from threatening or using physical force to intimidate people out of expressing their right to religious freedom.  However, the act also prohibits forceful attempts to interfere with so-called “reproductive health care services.” Therefore, Biden’s DOJ figures they can apply this act unevenly by targeting only pro-life protesters.  “The [Biden] administration has repeatedly met and coordinated with the abortion industry, but has refused to meet with representatives of the millions of pro-life Americans and concerned Catholic citizens who are being threatened and intimidated across the country,” CatholicVote President Brian Burch writes in their letter, dated June 21. “Nearly every single prosecution of alleged violence against abortion clinics has involved application of the FACE Act despite the lack of enforcement on attacks against churches and pregnancy resource centers,” Burch adds. “What policies are in place at the DOJ which contribute to this imbalance, and what is being done to rectify it?” After two years of crickets from the DOJ despite numerous communication requests, they finally sent ONE response to CatholicVote in June 2024, updating the group that three Florida pro-abortionists pled guilty to threatening pro-life pregnancy resource centers.  Still, most of these attacks are “not being pursued with any diligence by the federal government,” Tommy Valentine, director of CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project, told The Daily Signal. Valentine added,  “And a lot of these are centrally organized by domestic extremist organizations like Jane’s Revenge, like Ruth Sent Us, various anarchist groups that are clearly coordinating at least some of these attacks."  Apparently these violent extremists are receiving the same coddling as the Hamas-holes calling for another 9/11 in our city streets.  After all, Biden’s DOJ has more important things to worry about like throwing eighty-two-year-olds in prison for protesting against the murder of unborn babies and branding angry soccer moms as terrorists for protesting their woke school boards.

Mark Zuckerberg-owned Facebook and Instagram targeted a clothing company critical of gender ideology instead of cracking down on advertising of illegal drugs running rampant on their platforms.  The Wall Street Journal exposed the social media networks in a Wednesday article for allegedly profiting off of ads that directed users to websites selling illegal drugs. The Journal reported that it found dozens of such ads while noting that the non-profit Tech Transparency Project had found 450 of them. In response to this article, Jennifer Sey, founder of XX-XY Athletics, a pro-women sports company, accused Meta of handicapping her company’s ads all while allowing the placement of illegal drug ads.  Instagram “will run ads for illegal drugs including cocaine but severely limits the reach of an ad (essentially shadow-banning) for @xx_xyathletics, a brand standing up to protect women's sports. How is this the world?” Sey wrote on X. Sey accused Meta of more than just misplaced priorities. In a July 3 Substack post, she explained that Meta restricted her company’s ability to buy ads targeting the followers of high-profile accounts that share Sey’s views. Meta’s censorship reportedly occurred while they placed no such limits on ads targeting the followers of leftist accounts.  Specifically, Meta did not allow XX-XY Athletics to target the followers of three women’s rights activists: former collegiate swimmer-turned-women's rights advocate Riley Gaines, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and social media personality Isabel Brown. Yet Meta did not place restrictions on targeting the followers of leftist former soccer player Megan Rapinoe or President Joe Biden.  Sey said that this greatly limited the effectiveness of her company’s social media ads and cost her a great deal of money. The XX-XY Athletics founder said that “targeting the followers of influencers who align with a brand’s message increases return on ad spend by 3 to 4x.” She explained that her company’s inability to buy targeted ads meant that XX-XY Athletics would have to spend far more to have the same effect.  Here's the ad from @xx_xyathletics that was shadow-banned. This is considered "offensive" in today's upside down world. pic.twitter.com/tuU96MC0Dx — Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) July 31, 2024 And while Meta was tilting the scale to favor transgender activists and the left, the psychedelic drug DMT and cocaine were being advertised on their platform, the Journal reported.  Meta claimed it took down many of these drug ads in 48 hours and banned the users responsible, but has not answered for censoring XX-XY Athletics. MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris made clear that Meta’s takeaway from this event should be reassessing its priorities, not more censorship. “More constitutionally protected speech, not less,” said Morris. “That should be the priority of an American company like Meta, particularly during a highly contentious Olympics where women’s sports are once again front and center.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that the State Department be held to account to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and that Big Tech mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

So, Kamala Harris is the new Democratic candidate for president. And, we’ve been told, she is incredible. Not merely serviceable, a middle innings relief pitcher brought in when your starter suddenly implodes in the third inning. She is the Mariano Rivera of politics. She’s lights-out. She’s charismatic, fascinating, quick on her feet, charming. She is, in the words of the legacy media, a historic candidate — not just because she’s a Black woman, a fact that explains her lightning-fast political ascent but that only Democrats are allowed to mention, and only then in the context of explaining why America requires a Black female president — but because she is, apparently, so good at this. Apparently, Harris was the candidate America needed all along. As in a bad romcom, all we needed to do was remove her glasses, brush out her hair and put her in a better outfit — and she would transform from high school weirdo nerd into prom queen. The media’s shift in position regarding Harris has been whiplash-inducing. After all, we were told in 2020 that she had run one of the worst campaigns in modern presidential history — mechanical, off-putting, unpleasant, incompetent and arrogant. Then we were told that she was one of the worst vice presidents in modern history — free of accomplishment, running a completely dysfunctional office with extraordinary rates of staff turnover, so wildly unpopular that even a senile Joe Biden worried about whether Harris could compete with Donald Trump. But now all is forgiven. All her oddities — coconut trees and electric school buses, Venn diagrams and the significance of the passage of time — are delightful TikTok memes. Her strangely incoherent word salads, topped off with a heavy helping of smugness, are now evidence of her rhetorical brilliance. Her wild hand motions, so reminiscent of a drunken tarmac operator attempting unsuccessfully to usher a jumbo jet toward the gateway, are actually enchanting symptoms of her enthusiasm. And her positional dishonesty — the fact that she has now shifted virtually every position she ever held — is not evidence that she is a liar, but that she is astute and clever. So, precisely what happened to turn Kamala Harris from a deeply disliked politician (35% approval rating) into an Obama-esque talent (44% approval rating)? Joe Biden dropped out. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. When Biden dropped out, the legacy media could finally end the rock-in-the-shoe discomfort of cognitive dissonance from which they had been suffering since Biden’s brain-dead debate with Trump. They had been forced by circumstance into doing something they despise: objective journalism, in which Democrats are treated as normal figures subject to cross-examination. Since Barack Obama’s ascent nearly 20 years ago, the media have avoided just this sort of thing. Biden’s collapse onstage compelled them to do some journalism, just to cover their asses — otherwise, they would have been implicated in his health coverup. So they did. But they didn’t like it. Now, Biden is gone. They can declare victory. And they can go right back to bathing in the warm, urine-filled kiddie pool of Democrat-media coordination they so enjoy. They’ve eaten their vegetables. Now it’s time for dessert: a heavy helping of Kamala cake. And they’re going to enjoy it. The only question is whether the American people will fall for this quite obvious and heavy-handed routine. So far, some have. But presidential campaigns have a way of sanding off the varnish lacquered on by the friendly media. After all, at one point, the legacy media gave Hillary Clinton the same treatment. It didn’t work out well. In the end, politicians tend to stand or fall on their own merit. Which is terrible news for Kamala Harris, since she has none. Ben Shapiro’s new collection, "Facts and Furious: The Facts About America and Why They Make Leftists Furious," is available now. Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show," and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) is once again setting the record straight. On Wednesday, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins confronted Democrat Stacey Abrams over her rhetoric about the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. Despite losing the race to now-Gov. Brian Kemp (R), Abrams told supporters that she actually "won" the race, she refused to concede her loss, and she even claimed the race was "stolen." 'The latest comments from Stacey Abrams show that she still can’t accept that she lost in 2018.' Collins asked Abrams whether she "regrets" her past claims. The innocent question clearly frustrated Abrams. The twice-failed gubernatorial candidate responded by chiding Collins to "go back to elementary school," claiming she didn't contest the 2018 election outcome itself, but the "process that was used," and alleged the "courts agreed with us." When Collins pushed back — citing Abrams' own words — Abrams immediately interjected and stopped Collins from talking. "Well, I do remember the time you told the New York Times, 'I won.' You did describe it as a stolen election. The courts did side with the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger—" Collins said before she was cut off. "Kaitlan, that's actually incorrect," Abrams interjected. "And normally, I wouldn't cut you off. But you're repeating disinformation." Abrams claimed a 2022 court decision that ruled against her claims actually ruled in her favor. She accused Collins of only reading "headlines" to the detriment of the "fine print." Raffensperger responds Is Abrams telling the truth? Is Collins guilty of spewing "disinformation"? Not according to Raffensperger. "In my time in office, I have spent a lot of time holding failed candidates like Stacey Abrams accountable to Georgia's voters," he said in a statement. "The latest comments from Stacey Abrams show that she still can’t accept that she lost in 2018. And the fact that she still can’t accept that means she has no business going on TV talking about defending democracy." The truth of the matter, Raffensperger added, is that Abrams "lost fair and square under the established rules of the game." "She even spent over $50 million of her donors’ money to try to show that the rules were unfair to her, but she completely lost on all her claims," he explained. "She lost not because of any technicality like she now tries to claim, but because, after getting millions of documents and conducting hundreds of depositions, the evidence didn’t support her claims," he wrote. "She had every chance in the world to prove her claims of 'systematic voter suppression' and she couldn’t do it because her claims were nothing but cheap, political talking points." Raffensperger accused Abrams of using "flowery language about protecting the right to vote" to obscure the fact "that she is just an election denier." "She wants everyone to forget that her group continually referred to the 2018 election as a 'stolen election' and referred to Governor Kemp as Governor* Kemp for many months after he was legitimately elected and sworn in," Raffensperger went on to say. "But Abrams and Fair Fight did both of those things, and they should be ashamed. "The only thing she should be going on TV to say is that she lost the 2018 election fair and square and that she apologizes for her post-election refusal to accept that fact," he said. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A former FBI agent was sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl while he was serving as an Alabama state trooper. The convicted child sexual predator was reportedly booted from the FBI after numerous sexual misconduct claims, including that he raped a co-worker at knifepoint. In the end, a forged letter allegedly enabled him to obtain the state trooper position. Montgomery County Circuit Judge Jimmy Pool sentenced Christopher Bauer, 45, to life in prison Thursday.Despite the disgraceful dismissal, Bauer was allegedly able to get a job as an Alabama state trooper in 2019 by using a forged FBI letter. In June, Bauer was convicted on charges of first-degree sodomy and sexual abuse of a child less than 12 years of age.Bauer faces similar child sex abuse charges in New Orleans, the Associated Press reported. Louisiana State Police said they plan on extraditing him.The Montgomery County District Attorney's Office said in a statement that Bauer sexually abused "a young girl over the span of several years" while he was an Alabama state trooper. In April 2021, the victim reportedly confided in a friend that Bauer had been sexually abusing her since the age of 5. Two days later, the friend told her mother about the sexual abuse allegations. The mother informed school administrators of the alleged child sex crimes, and the school officials immediately contacted the Montgomery Police Department. Bauer was arrested and charged on the same day.The victim's mother told the judge in court, “He’s a monster." The girl's mother claimed Bauer used his police badge to project the “image of a good person.”“He had everyone fooled,” she added. During the trial, Bauer denied the allegations of sexually abusing the young girl and accused the victim of lying. "If she said I did something to her, then yes, that's a lie," Bauer said. However, Judge Pool proclaimed during sentencing that he “believed every single word” of the victim’s testimony.Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey said, “It is always extremely disappointing when someone who is supposed to enforce and uphold the law commits a crime against the people they have sworn to protect. However, I do not believe Christopher Bauer reflects the character of most of the law enforcement officers who serve our country. He is a bad apple — a depraved monster who abused his power to irreparably harm a vulnerable, innocent child.”Bailey continued, “I commend the victim for having the courage to speak up about what was happening to her. She was so brave throughout her testimony, which was undoubtedly difficult for her. I hope she and her family take solace in knowing Christopher Bauer will never harm her nor anyone else ever again. My office fought for the maximum sentence in this case, and I extend my gratitude to Judge Jimmy Pool for sentencing this sexual predator to life in prison, as that is where he deserves to die.”Bauer previously worked for the FBI in New Orleans until he reportedly was dismissed from the bureau after several sexual misconduct claims.A May 2021 Associated Press story stated that Bauer was suspended without pay and stripped of his FBI security clearance in late 2018 over a "string of sexual misconduct allegations" that included a co-worker’s claim that he raped her at knifepoint.Despite the disgraceful dismissal, Bauer allegedly was able to get a job as an Alabama state trooper in 2019 by using a forged FBI letter. Bauer reportedly indicated on his state trooper application that the FBI never let him go or had any derogatory claims against him. Bauer allegedly furnished a fake letter from the FBI to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency that said he had a decade of “creditable service” and was “eligible for rehire.”However, the FBI informed the AP: “The letter is not legitimate.” Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!